This summer, Princess Anne and her husband Tim — Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, to be precise — have been enjoying their beautiful £500,000 cruising yacht.

Unlike certain other royals one can think of, they bought it new and paid for the sleek, personally customised Rustler 44 themselves.

With twin cabins, a large galley and lounge areas, such extravagance represents more than two years of the Princess Royal’s official pay, which she receives from the Queen for her royal duties. And private yachts are notoriously costly to maintain.

Princess Anne, 63, and Vice Admiral Sir Tim Lawrence, 59, have been married for 22 years

Despite this, they can afford it. Since leaving the Royal Navy in 2010, her husband has moved on, with remarkable adroitness, from being an admiral to becoming a significant figure in the world of property and lucrative big business.

Sir Tim spent the last three of his 37 years in the Navy at the MoD in Whitehall, as chief executive of Defence Estates. His job was to manage its £23 billion property portfolio covering 93,000 acres in 4,000 sites.

Then, two years after he retired, he stepped across into the property world on his own account, becoming a non-executive director of Capita Property and Infrastructure.

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This is a subsidiary of the giant £8 billion Capita Group, whose London offices are conveniently just a short stroll across the park from St James’s Palace, where he and the Princess Royal have an apartment.

At the time his move was met with some unease among Palace courtiers — and their concern has turned out to be rather prescient. For this week, the Mail’s Sebastian Shakespeare Diary revealed that Capita Property and Infrastructure has landed a £400 million MoD contract to manage Armed Forces housing and military bases.

The MoD says the decision to award Capita the contract was the result of ‘robust and fair competition’. Capita says Sir Tim played no part in the bid.

These assurances have not satisfied everybody, however.

Sir Bob Russell, a Lib Dem member of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, says he is so ‘worried’ about the deal that he intends to ask questions in the House.

It’s believed to be the first time that concerns about ‘revolving door’ deals — ex-government ministers or top civil servants taking their inside knowledge into private sector jobs — have involved a member of the Royal Family.

No one could have anticipated such a development 20-odd years ago when the former navigating officer on the old Royal Yacht Britannia was seconded to be the Queen’s equerry, and was soon sending intimate love letters to her daughter.

Anne married the tall and charming naval commander in 1992, four months after her troubled first marriage to Captain Mark Phillips was dissolved.

Of course, the outside world is full of potholes for those who throw in their lot with the royals. But of all the in-laws who could prove embarrassing to the House of Windsor — think Fergie squeezing every drop of profit out of being Duchess of York, or the Countess of Wessex talking carelessly about Prince Edward’s relatives when she was a PR girl — one would have thought it not remotely possible that the quietly spoken and ever-courteous Tim might be among them.

In the entire 22 years of his marriage to Princess Anne, he’s hardly uttered a word in public unless it was about one of the charities he helps, such as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution or the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But here he is, apparently about to be the subject of questions in the House.

Making waves: The royal couple have recently bought a £500,000 yacht similar to this Rustler 44

What must be said, is that since he stepped into the big-money world of property and redevelopment, the Queen’s son-in-law has been very much at home and entirely comfortable — until now. Capita, it turns out, is just one of his lucrative posts.

The Camberwell-born ex-frigate commander is also a key figure advising the huge Dorchester Group, a property development and regeneration company founded 17 years ago in London’s East End by former medic Dr Gary Silver and Ian Amdur, who trained as a singer at the Guildhall School of Music.

The group — not to be confused with the Dorchester hotel group owned by the Sultan of Brunei — soon became the largest private landlord in the East End and is now involved in major housing projects across the country including Oxford, Surrey, Liverpool, Manchester, Southampton, Portsmouth, Birmingham and Nottingham. It also has interests in Cuba, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Although the Dorchester Group remains a private company, it battles on equal terms with international giants.

In February, the group settled out of court a £750 million claim against Ikea after the Swedish furniture giant unexpectedly ousted it as the preferred bidder for a 13-acre site next to the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London, on which a hotel, offices and almost 1,200 homes are to be built.

So involved is Sir Tim with this company that he is sometimes referred to by associates as its ‘chairman’. Says a spokeswoman: ‘Sir Timothy isn’t the chairman, he’s an adviser and consultant to the team, especially on large-scale regeneration projects.’

Curiously, however, on the com-pany’s extensive website, Sir Tim’s picture, complete with potted biography, is at the top, with those of the company’s hyper-rich founders Dr Silver and Mr Amdur underneath. One company of which Sir Tim really is the chairman is the Oxford-based Major Projects Association. This is an organisation crucial to big-time networkers, bringing key people together, often at seminars.

It states that its purpose is ‘to improve the initiation and delivery of major projects through the interaction of members from all sectors in sharing experience, knowledge and ideas’.

The high-powered board that meets under Sir Tim’s chairmanship includes Graham Dalton, chief executive of the Highways Agency, and Simon Kirby, chief executive of High Speed Two Ltd, the company at the heart of the controversial £50 billion plan for high-speed trains between London and Birmingham and then further north.

Sir Tim became chairman of the Major Projects Association on April 1, 2013. He chairs several meetings a year, either in Oxford or in London, and does so, apparently, ‘with great aplomb’.

And then there is Sir Tim’s role as military consultant to PA Consulting, which provides specialists in anything from corporate strategy to power supplies and defence and security.

‘Tim’s a very busy boy,’ says a corporate colleague in property-world vernacular. ‘He’s what every company wants — class and contacts, a wonderful name on the masthead. But he knows a bit, too.’

All in all, while other members of the Royal Family often complain about how impecunious they are, it’s hardly surprising that he and the Princess Royal could afford to swap their ageing 36ft Rustler, called Blue Doublet, for a costly, brand new 44-footer.

The yacht, which they have christened Ballochbuie, is described in promotional literature as ‘powerful, comfortable and exceptionally well-behaved . . . a fast, blue-water cruiser combining exceptional performance with exceptional comfort’.

The Princess Royal is patron of the Northern Lighthouse Board — she has been studying lighthouses ever since, aged five, she was taken by the Queen to Tiumpan Head on the Isle of Lewis.

Last month, as part of her quest to see every one of Scotland and the Isle of Man’s 205 lighthouses, she and Tim sailed off together to visit some of them.

For her it was also an opportunity to have him to herself for a few days, while Tim was going back to his first love — being at sea again.

The boat, and what it offers, could hardly be bettered for a couple whose marriage is constantly being written off, largely because of the time they spend apart.

Sir Tim, who was 59 in March, spends most of his time in London. He has no official duties of his own although he accompanies Anne on significant occasions such as Trooping the Colour and to the Cenotaph.

Anne, who will be 64 next month, and remains one of the busiest royals, spends almost all her free time at Gatcombe Park, her home in Gloucestershire, very aware that Tim has little interest in horses.

‘They’re very different, but they just fit,’ says one of the Princess Royal’s circle.

The firm Sir Tim (pictured with Princess Anne) works for has been awarded a £400million MoD contract

Ironically, first husband Mark Phillips, who trains riders and designs show-jumping courses, is almost as much a presence in his former wife’s life as when they were married.

Captain Phillips, who got a ‘modest’ divorce settlement from Anne in 1992 after 19 years of marriage, lives with his second wife Sandy at Aston Farm on the Gatcombe estate, where they are all described as ‘great friends, it’s all very relaxed’.

That marriage was already in deep trouble when Commander Tim Laurence arrived on the scene as a royal equerry and he and the Princess began a secret affair.

She is alleged to have ‘form’ in that department, of course — an affair with one of her protection squad, Detective Sgt Peter Cross, a married officer from Mitcham, South London.

He was subsequently released from his duties and later sold his kiss-and-tell story to the News of the World for £600,000 — some £2 million in today’s money.

In it, he claimed the Princess Royal snuggled up to him on the sofa while watching TV at Gatcombe and they had intimate meetings in the library and in a lodge on the estate, in the changing rooms of a swimming pool at Windsor and a rendezvous in a semi in Ewell, Surrey, loaned to them for the afternoon by a friend.

To her great credit, Princess Anne has never acknowledged, let alone commented on, these lurid claims.

Anne’s affair with Tim Laurence produced another crisis when his intimate love letters were stolen and offered to a national newspaper, but they were never published.

For his part, Commander Laurence had no idea how his life — or, for that matter, his prospects — would change when he became the Queen’s equerry. He was a bachelor in his mid-30s who had spent much of his life at sea.

Three years after marrying Princess Anne he was made a captain, the first of four promotions up to vice admiral, and he was eventually given a knighthood from the Queen.

Tim’s a pretty contented chap these days,’ says an old chum from Naval days. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll ever take to horses, but he enjoys being in the boardroom. And he loves the new boat.’